


When the moon greets you

by jonasnightingale



Category: Pretty Little Liars
Genre: F/M, might continue, no beta we die like men, otp: swedish crime novels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 22:27:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28999755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonasnightingale/pseuds/jonasnightingale
Summary: Set after 5x22, Holbrook comes back for Hanna.Before Alison, before his career fell to threads around him, there had been a girl. There had been mispronunciations and Swedish crime novel recommendations and his first name on her tongue.
Relationships: Gabriel Holbrook/Hanna Marin
Kudos: 1





	When the moon greets you

He comes back for her. Despite everything. He walks back into that police station with his head high and his spine straight, nods to the officers he worked side by side with for the better part of a year. And he’s filled with shame, when he thinks of their last interaction, and the one before. God these past few months he has hardly recognised himself. What he became. How he has acted. 

Away from the web of Alison he’s started to feel tethered again, brought back to reality by the Swedish crime novels and film noir movies. Though the photos tacked to his office wall taunt him, incomplete timelines, conflicting stories, threads that don’t quite connect. He’s not sure of anything in this town. But he feels he knows Hanna. Knows the grit of who she is. Her sass, her deflection, her ferocity. He feels every day that he understands less and less of the blackhole around this group of friends, but he would stake his life on one thing; that Hanna did not kill Mona. She may be many things, but her moral compass points true north, even if it has little regard for the law.

And he carries his behaviour that day as a ball of lead in his gut - to have said those things, to have accused her of being just another lackey. He’s thought so often about the words she lobbied back at him, the allegations she laid against him. Another fall guy, how many were there, what other awful deeds were they carrying out that the police force was so blind to. And he’s thought so often about the words she didn’t say, about the derogatory references to his background, his family, his childhood home that so many others would have thrown in his face. She’d seen it, been there, and yet her remarks were bordered firmly in the present. He’s tried to not think about her eyes darting so momentarily downwards, the charged electricity between them. Tried to not think how this nice moment between them that had been cushioned so easily between their burgeoning friendship would now forever be tainted by his hand rough on her jaw, his angry “ _oh she did didn’t she?_ ”. Alison had never been between them, never more than an ancillary part of the story, but now she was the centre. 

It’s easy enough to get in to see her, and he fidgets - uncharacteristically nervous - as he waits. When she walks in he feels it like a sucker punch to the gut. None of the warmth or fondness that typically laced her expression remains, and though her eyes are red and weary, evidence of a rough night, they still pierce him with the ice cold glare thrown his way. She plops down into the chair opposite and he feels his heart twist at the bruise on her cheek bone, the fingernail scratches along her hairline. “What do you want Holbrook? Come to gloat?” His lips move into a small frown and he feels more himself than he has in a long time when he meets her gaze and replies. “Come to apologise actually. Belatedly. I know it’s long overdue.” This is where everything started, an apology, the symmetry knocks his breath out. 

**Author's Note:**

> “All great beginnings start in the dark, when the moon greets you to a new day at midnight.”  
> ― Shannon L. Alder


End file.
